That’s actually how I’m treated here in Copenhagen. I’m looked upon as a kind of Englishman, a half-crazy eccentric, with whom let’s all of us, notables and street urchins alike, imagine we can make sport. My writing activity, that enormous productivity whose inner pathos I’d have though could stir stones, and which in some areas none of my contemporaries can match, let alone the whole–all of this is looked on as a kind of passion, like fishing and so on.
Soren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, ed. & trans. Alastair Hannay, Penguin: 1996 [1848], 48 IX A 288.
Looking, Thinking, Falling Over 